Pura Vida - Construction Phase 1!

"It didn’t take us very long to persuade the people from the Jovenes salven Jovenes sports association to build the park on their property and the following day we started immidiately. When the first materials aka bricks, concrete, dirt, steal and so called base, a sand/stone mixture, were delieverd we already had the first tools at hand, which we either bought or got from locals. Then Diego, our trusted man with the caterpillar, placed the dirt for us, so we didn’t have to shovel for a week and by doing so lose valuable time.

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After that the first step was to build the needed backwalls for the obstacles what we have been doing for the last three days. Some of the local skaters helped us, some more, some less, as well as a bunch of little kids from the neighborhoods. Those are very good and inexhaustable in going on our nerves, but they help as good as they can and don’t mind getting dirty. At the beginning we had some doubts about our walls being earthquake proof, because with our cheap way of building we can’t guarantee that. But we already had the ultimate test run when on Sunday night an earthquake hit town with 6.0 on the richter scale, no joke! And from what the locals told us it’s been like 20 years since they had an earthquake that hard, but our walls are still standing perfectly. The father of two of the little kids had already told us that our walls are built pretty decent, and he builds walls professionally as a job.

Tomorrow, we will take a day off on the beach in Dominical, because all of us have been here for at least two weeks and we haven’t seen much of Costa Rica so far besides the town of San Isidro. On Wednesday we will continue building the park and move the last dirt into place. Maybe we ask Diego again to help us, because 17,- euros per hour are nothing compared to german prizes. And then we hope that we can pour the first concrete on the weekend, test wise we will mix it ourselves because we still got 70 50 kilo sacks of concrete left from bulding the walls.

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So much about the construction site, we have about five weeks left to finish the park and there’s a lot of work to do. So next week we will move to the Jovenes Salven Jovenes property and get ourselves some beamers so we can get more work done during the days, because at 6.30 pm it’s already pitch dark over here. By the way, we’re taken care of very well and cheap with food at the little shop on the property courtesy of Mama Pinto and her husband Chencho, the caretaker of the whole institution.

Of course, when we didn’t work in the dirt, we already went skating a couple of times, more or less dancing in the dirt. The best time to skate is definitely in the evenings, because of a) the heat, and b) less people and traffic on the streets. On the other hand the spots are even harder to skate then as they already are since there’re not too many streetlights around. But we always try to make the best out of it. We weven managed to party once or twice, but we won’t bore you with details, it’s more or less the same as back home.

We will let you read more news soon on this very channel, Pura Vida so far."